Secure erase question/help?

I've got an iMac selling very soon and the secure erase is 2/3 complete and I might have to cancel it and I'm wondering if that'll have gotten rid of all my data?

I had two partitions: 1400GB (OS X) / 600GB (Win 7). About 250GB on Win7 and 150GB on OS X. Is the data ordered or scattered all over the disk? I'm hoping 2/3 complete (writing zero's) will have removed all my data.

I've got an iMac selling very soon and the secure erase is 2/3 complete and I might have to cancel it and I'm wondering if that'll have gotten rid of all my data?

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No one can possibly know, but if you are doing the 7x or 35x overwrite dont bother, a single pass with zeros or random data will be sufficient and far faster. If you are only writing zeroes once and its only done 2/3 well of course its always possible there is some of your data left.

No one can possibly know, but if you are doing the 7x or 35x overwrite dont bother, a single pass with zeros or random data will be sufficient and far faster. If you are only writing zeroes once and its only done 2/3 well of course its always possible there is some of your data left.

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All right, thanks. I did a single pass. I was hoping that the data might be stored at the front of the drive, if that makes sense, and since I had so little data (300GB) it'll have erased that part really early on. Just to explain what I was hoping would be the case, although I kind of know the data is scattered all over the disk, anyway.

OK, so odds are all your the data was stored at the front, but if you've had it a while, added and removed partitions, put some big files in then removed them, etc its always possible there will be something there.

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